Civic and government30 cards: 15 firsts, 5 claimed firsts and 10 beginnings
The county and its courthouses, the courts, City Hall, the police, the fire department, the city’s plans and the wartime camps.
- Smith County’s commissioners’ court meets for the first timeElected, and seated before the end of 1846.
- The state’s inventory counts five courthouses in TylerLog cabins of 1846 and 1848, then 1852, 1910 and 1955.
- Smith County holds its first electionSmith County held its first election on August 8, 1846, choosing its first judge, clerk, sheriff, assessor, collector, treasurer and a three-member commission.
- The county’s first court session meets in a log cabinAn abandoned one-room cabin in Tyler, December 1846.
- A log courthouse, Tyler’s first civic buildingOn the north side of the square, 1847.
- The Masons, Tyler’s first fraternal orderSt. John’s Lodge No. 53; the Odd Fellows followed in 1851.
- The 1852 courthouse, whose bricks went into later onesGone now; its bricks went into the 1908 and 1955 courthouses.
- Camp Ford becomes a prison campCamp Ford began in 1862 as a Confederate conscript-training camp four miles northeast of Tyler, named for Col. John S. (Rip) Ford.
- The new Court of Criminal Appeals sits in TylerFrom its start until 1908, says a 1992 state marker.
- Smith County’s fourth jail goes upLater the Lewis Hotel, until 1986.
- Tyler’s first fire departmentA 25-member volunteer company under John B. Douglas.
- Horace Chilton, Texas’ first native-born U.S. senatorHorace Chilton, a lawyer, was appointed to the U.S. Senate in 1891 by Gov. James Hogg and was Texas’ first native-born U.S. senator.
- Tyler becomes a cityThen, after a 1915 election, a manager-commission government.
- Smith County builds a three-story courthouseIt served until the present courthouse was built in 1954.
- J. J. Ray, Tyler’s first police officerLater its first chief; uniforms came in 1932.
- Tyler adopts its first city planJust as the oil boom began; it was updated in 1945.
- The Woman’s Building is completedMeeting rooms, an auditorium and a library for the Woman’s Forum.
- City Hall, the first building to hold all the city’s offices212 North Bonner Avenue, completed in 1938.
- The city’s survey dates Tyler’s first Black officers to the 1940sAssigned to Black neighborhoods; integration followed in the 1960s.
- Construction begins on Camp FanninAn infantry-replacement training center, ten miles northeast of Tyler.
- Prisoners of war arrive at Camp FanninMen of the Afrika Korps; the camp held more than 1,000.
- The first Black attorney to try a case in the county courthouseHe won, in the 7th Judicial District Court.
- Andrew Melontree Sr., the county’s first Black commissionerPrecinct 4, from 1983 to 2002.
- Herb Hayter, the police department’s first minority supervisorPromoted to sergeant in 1995, KLTV reported.
- JoAnn Hampton, in her words the first Black woman commissionerPrecinct 4, from January 1, 2003.
- Barbara Bass, Tyler’s first woman mayorIn May 2008 Barbara Bass won the Tyler mayor’s race with a little more than 60 percent of the vote, making her the city’s first woman mayor.
- McDonald Lorance, Tyler’s first mayorMcDonald Lorance served as Tyler’s first mayor.
- Gustavo Ramirez, as of 2019 the only Hispanic elected to the councilHis years on the council are not given.
- Ira Brown, called Tyler’s first Black policeman in a headlineKETK’s story itself called him one of the first.
- Quincy Beavers, Smith County’s first Black judgeA justice of the peace for 28 years, until 2022.